Obligations in Afghanistan

By Hugh Gorman | January 9, 2010 at 1:19 pm

In the current issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen argues that the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and likely to fail.  Several respondents have varying analyses of Rosen’s piece: some agree with his conclusion but thinks he misses a few points; others claim that he is too pessimistic. Aziz Hakimi thinks Rosen is right to doubt the success of an American-lead COIN operation in Afghanistan, but claims that Rosen is wrong in marking Karzai’s government as illegitimate—there is hope for politics in Afghanistan, says Hakimi, as long as the central government devolves power to local officials. Hakimi, however, is not clear about what responsibilities the United States has in Afghanistan, if any. This omission clouds the discussion of what the United States should expect to accomplish in Afghanistan.

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Do soldiers believe in counterinsurgency tactics?

By Hugh Gorman | December 5, 2009 at 2:22 pm

In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.

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